Reading Recommendations: Scholarly Reads
Traditionally, Freya Project Events feature five readers responding to a prompt. However, for this unique event, we have invited scholars Vanessa Péres-Rosario, Sandy Plácido, and Vanessa K. Valdés for a panel discussion about three Puerto Rican activists who have been left out of mainstream historical discussions.
The following are books these scholars recommend.
Native Country of the Heart: A Memoir
by Cherríe Moraga
Recommended by Vanessa Pérez-Rosario
Why Vanessa loves it:
“This book moved me. It beautifully chronicles a daughter's relationship to her mother, who has developed Alzheimers. Though telling this story, Moraga explores questions of cultural amnesia. I highly recommend it!”
“My mother cried the first time she told me this story. I was a little girl and I cried, too, at the picture of it. A picture of hardship, yes; but more than that—injustice.”
Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision
by Barbara Ransby
Recommended by Sandy Plácido
Why Sandy loves it:
“A very important model for my own work. Before this book, historical narratives covering U.S. Civil Rights, Black Power, and leftist movements in the twentieth century did not fully acknowledge Baker's crucial roles in these spaces. I love this book because of how elegantly Ransby contextualizes Ella Baker's decades of activism in the Black freedom struggle, tracing the many ways that she led and shaped that movement.”
remembered rapture
by bell hooks
Recommended by Vanessa K. Valdés
Why Vanessa loves it:
“This was the first collection I read that was a complete meditation on writing and this writing life. A quiet book, it speaks to how writing itself can be activism; it broadened my idea of what my life as a professor could be.”
“A distinction must be made between that writing which enables us to hold on to life even as we are clinging to old hurts and wounds and that writing which offers to us a space where we are able to confront reality in such a way that we live more fully. Such writing is not an anchor that we mistakenly cling to so as not to drown. It is writing that truly rescues, that enables us to reach the shore, to recover.”